Small business owners often have to deal with alot of decisions, plans, ideas and problems. A technique to aid in organizing, brain storming, problem solving, and decision making is Mind mapping.
Mind mapping is a concept that uses linked diagrams to represents the relationship between ideas. This technique is a useful way to help generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas. (What to find out? Here are some mind mapping books
FreeMind is an open source application to help you to create mind map diagrams.
For the simplest creation of mind mapping diagram, you could have just use an application like OpenOffice Draw to put it together. Using FreeMind however, simplified the tedious work. Freemind also allows larger and more elaborate diagrams to be created.
If you had seen mind mapping diagram before, the diagrams generated by FreeMind are very plain in comparison. Many of the flashy mind mapping diagrams are created as memory aids.
Mind mapping researchers suggest that colors, graphics and unique style helps the brain to remember and recall. Although FreeMind does not shine in this area, it is still a very useful tool to create digital mind maps.
As mentioned in the introduction, mind map is very useful in planning and visualizing. Here is a mind map of my interests/goals. I’m using it to brainstorm how I can synergise what interests me and in relation to my business.
What I like about FreeMind
- Simplify Mind Mapping
- Able to expand and collapse nodes
What can be improved
- More intuitive interface
- More frequently update (Is development still active?)
Chinese support
FreeMind has Chinese interface built-in and support Chinese characters text.
To switch switch to Chinese,
- go to Tools > Preferences … > Language and change to Zh CN
- restart
Where to get it?
- FreeMind is at http://freemind.sourceforge.net/
- Current version: 0.8.0
- Function: Mind mapping application
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